Funel

After struggling with what ideas were relevant enough to include and which were distracting and having sent my introduction to family members for feed back (ranging from finished high school to PHD) I am left with the following funnel. I am pretty happy with it, though my guess is I will be doing a second round edit after I let it sit, untouched and published (sort of) for a couple days. Here it is:

From the dawn of time people have attempted to instill values and pro-social citizen behavior/attitudes in the rising generation. Songs, stories, and working side by side in apprentice positions bound children to their parents and their culture. In aggregate, these attempts to instill moral, pro-social, and ‘invested feelings” into children is called education. Over the centuries, developing nations increasing formalized this human ritual and organized schools, libraries, and lectures. This formalizing of education was in an attempt to accent and maximize the long-recognized soul-refining of learning. It was not the mere accumulation of knowledge that had potent promise, but it was rather the infusement of knowledge with culture, moral obligation, and paradigms viewing humans as relationally connected. This benefit was so widely recognized that we moved from elite private educational experience to governments endorsing the universalization (publication) of these benefits by creating public schools. With these schools, religious influence was originally the chief benefactor in creating pro-social citizens attitudes and behaviors. After the French Revolution Burke claimed this influence to be mostly ripped away from education and argued that educators must fill the vacuum. Nitizche would later famously say “God is dead.” In the absence of what was previously the single greatest driving force of the soul-refining aspect to education, the academy turned toward alternative sources in hopes of maintaining education’s soul-refining effect. These alternative sources included Burke’s own moral reasoning and the development of and commitment to natural law theory. Educators today are still attempting to create pro-social citizens with additional tools such as Moral Intuition, Ethics Reasoning, Character development, empathy exercises, narratives, etc. These methods have mixed results but generally have people wishing education could yield still more influence on youth’s development (grandma’s “kids these days”). A return to the theistic influences within education-the optimal solution- is currently politically untenable. I wish to argue for further development of temporary holding places such as those listed above. One avenue that has not been explored is assisted charity practice. This aims at instilling care for community, adherence to law and order, and active civic engagement by helping students participate in micro-service projects. Those who are currently hardest to reach-those for whom the above skill sets/paradigms are working the least-are those behaviorally-challenged students who are habitual detention receivers. It is for this hard-to-reach population which I seek to develop a workable model within which they can develop as society expects students of education to do. The current detention model generally consists of a student “serving out time” by sitting in a room. Does optional participation in micro-service projects during detention periods increase a participating student’s pro-social attitudes more than the traditional punishment technique of just sitting there?